THE ATTACK ON "JEWISH HOLLYWOOD": A CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF MODERN AMERICAN ANTI-SEMITISM

Abstract

As United States became a magnet for mass Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe, imprecation was born: New York is not America. A continent away, with advent of movies a few decades later, coda was added: Neither is Hollywood. In tandem with entry of emancipated Jews into mainstream of modernity, traditional antiSemitic images ofJews as economic parasites and moral polluters were complemented by a new image of Jews as corrupters of popular culture. First, in nineteenth century, new popular journalism was anointed as what Sander Gilman calls the secret language of Jews. Then, in twentieth century, cinema supplanted newspaper in popular imagination as magical source of Jews' insidious power over culture. The Nazi purge of Weimar film industry, deemed corrupted by Jewish-Syrian influence; Stalin's persecution of Yiddish filmmakers, pilloried for the bourgeois cosmopoli-